Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

by Gardiner, John Eliot

  1. Being essentially self-taught he learnt by observation ‘the works of the most famous and proficient composers of his day and by the fruits of his own reflection upon them’.

  2. ‘Through his own study and reflection even in his youth he became a pure and strong writer of fugues.’

  3. ‘Thanks to his greatness in harmony’ when sight-reading a new piece he was able on the spur of the moment to convert a three-part texture into a complete quartet – all this ‘on the basis of a sparsely figured continuo part … being in a good humour and knowing that the composer would not take it amiss’.

  4. ‘When he listened to a rich and many-voiced fugue, he could soon say, after the first entries of the subjects, what contrapuntal devices it would be possible to apply, and which of them the composer by rights ought to apply, and on such occasions when I was standing next to him and he had voiced his surmises to me, he would joyfully nudge me when his expectations were fulfilled.’11

  Like a chess grand master, Bach is able to predict all the next conceivable moves. One would like to know whether someone so precise and so obviously comfortable with figures and structures was in the habit of applying these faculties to other areas. (Was there some ‘harmony’, for instance, in the way he set out his bills and accounts?) Bach seems to have been unique in identifying the elusive divine spark which for him, as Dreyfus suggests, lay at the core of musical and human experience and which he pursued through hard and arduous work.

  Another source of the spark of his imaginative ability to ‘elaborate’, similar to (3) above, comes in an observation recorded in 1741 by someone from Gottsched’s circle (see this page). Theodor Leberecht Pitschel can only have had Bach senior in mind (‘the famous man who has the greatest praise in our town’) when he suggests that he ‘does not get himself up to speed … to delight others with the mingling of his tones until he has played something from the printed or written page, inferior to his own ideas, and has [thus] set his powers of imagination [Einbildungskraft] in motion. And yet his superior ideas are the consequences of those inferior ones.’12 This sounds similar to Handel’s practice. Both men borrowed musical ideas as a spur to greater invention, but there is a subtle difference. While Bach adapted Vivaldi’s ritornello designs and the permutation fugue subjects of a previous generation, by far his most extensive borrowing came from his own compositions, leading to expansions and transformations, all part of his quest for perfection. Handel, on the other hand, borrowed from his own work mainly, one suspects, to save himself time and bother. He ‘stole’ from other composers’ works far more extensively than Bach did, particularly from his middle years onwards, but had the knack of transforming the originals so radically that they emerged as essentially new. This is what lies behind the description attributed to William Boyce – that Handel ‘takes other men’s pebbles and polishes them into diamonds’.13l

  Each time he was faced with a new poetic text lying on his desk, Bach needed to weigh up its form and the degree to which he felt constrained to replicate it in his musical structures or, alternatively, free to alter it. Unlike Johann Kuhnau, Bach was not a gifted linguist, so that his predecessor’s advice – that when faced with the task of setting a prose text, a composer should consider the given words in various other languages and take inspiration from there – was not much use to him.14 Naturally, where a close understanding already existed between him and his librettist, such issues did not generally arise. His collaboration with Leipzig’s young, twice-widowed salon poetess, Christiane Mariane von Ziegler, for example, was intense but did not last long. This may have been because he made alterations to the texts of nine of her cantatas to suit his own purposes (see Chapter 9). She got her own back, however, by publishing them in 1728 restored to their original state.m By far his most frequent literary partner was Christian Friedrich Henrici, usually known by his pseudonym Picander. Either by acquiescing or by negotiation Bach would normally allow the count of Picander’s verses to determine the number of movements in which his music was cast and even to let the accentual patterns of the text dictate his choice of metre or influence the rhythm of his thematic motifs and, less directly, the pitches, tonality and even the instrumentation. These decisions all flowed from Bach’s reading of the text and were in basic accord with it. This more or less matches Emanuel Bach’s slightly rosy picture of his father’s methods when composing Kirchensachen (‘church things’): ‘he worked devoutly, governing himself by the content of the text, without any strange distortion of the words or highlighting individual words at the expense of the overall sense, by means of which ridiculous thoughts often appear that sometimes arouse the admiration of people who claim to be connoisseurs and are not.’15

  What Emanuel does not describe are the times when his father decided to be less compliant. If his interpretation of the lectionary differed from that of Picander (or any other librettist’s poetic paraphrase or exposition) and his own thought patterns suggested an alternative structure, Bach was not always inclined to follow quite so submissively. It is at these moments that he reveals the full extent of his ambitions for music: for it to interpret and find meaning in the world about him. At that point no author or librettist could stop him from using his natural gifts, as Birnbaum describes them, to gain ‘imaginative insight into the depth of worldly wisdom’.16 On such occasions his risk-taking strategies could lead to a total disregard for the conventional rules of propriety in poetic construction: the rulebook is thrown out of the window and ends up in the street below. Some of his critics found these procedures impermissible – proof that he was wilful and headstrong. They puzzled even his most fervid supporters, who subscribed to the conventional notions of the ‘natural’ and ‘reasonable’ more readily than he did. There is a grain of bemusement as well as admiration in Emanuel’s description of his father’s melodies as ‘strange, but always varied, rich in invention, and resembling those of no other composer’.n

  One such case when Bach took matters into his own hands is the so-called Trauer-Ode (BWV 198). Here he was fulfilling a controversial commission to commemorate the passing of Queen Christiane Eberhardine, Electress of Saxony. There was a political dimension to the occasion. Queen Christiane was widely revered in Saxony for staying faithful to Lutheranism, unlike her late husband and son, who had converted to Catholicism in what many at the time saw as a cynical bid to qualify for the Polish crown. Bach’s music is dignified, atmospheric and profoundly moving. Its first movement bears a stylistic and emotive resemblance to the opening chorus of his Matthew Passion, which had first seen the light of day only a few months before. The memorial service was held in the university church on 17 October 1727, yet the score of the ode was not completed until the 15th, leaving less than two days for copying the parts and rehearsals. In setting it as a cantata, made up of choruses, arias and recitatives, Bach was treading on dangerous ground. The university church was not one of his usual haunts, and he had set words not by any old cantata hack, but by a respected university professor – Johann Christoph Gottsched, the leading exponent of literary reforms and lionised in Leipzig as a representative of rational literature. The trouble was that Gottsched’s mourning ode turned out to be insipid – a potpourri of banalities, mawkish sentiments and bathetic rhymes. Bach chose simply to disregard the formal layout of its strict eight-lined strophes with its regular rhyming scheme (A-B-B-A) and to ignore Gottsched’s textual hints as to what kind of setting would be appropriate. His crime was not so much his indifference to the elevated tone of Gottsched’s text, but the way that he supplanted and eclipsed it.o Johann Adolph Scheibe, predictably an avid admirer of Gottsched, tells us how Bach ought to have set it – by avoiding excesses of any kind, such as modulating to distant keys or using an ‘unending mass of metaphors and figures’. Yet it is precisely these metaphors and figures that make Bach’s setting so gripping. On the one occasion when Gottsched provides him with a quatrain that rises above the mediocre – ‘The bells’ vibrating clang / shall awaken our troubled s
ouls’ alarm / through their swung bronze / and pierce our marrow and our veins’ – Bach responds memorably. One would expect him to replicate the sound of funeral bells (see this page), and here he has an exceptional instrumental palette with which to do so: pairs of flutes, of oboes, and (unusually) of violas da gamba and lutes besides the strings and continuo. But it is what he does with these contrasting instrumental timbres in just eleven bars that is so astonishing. First he builds up the sonic profile by introducing each of the eleven upper lines one by one, each evoking a bell of a different size – from the smallest via the tap-tap chiming of the flutes, to a sustained tolling of middle-sized bells in the oboes and a haze of plucked strings, to the deep, sonorous booming of the larger bells in the gambas and continuo that clang ominously in regular fourths and fifths. By now we have moved from D with a flat seventh in the oboe via a diminished seventh to C minor, a minor ninth on E. Then, below the third inversion of the dominant seventh on C, comes an abrupt (and by the standards of the day, impermissible) rocking back and forth from E to A in the bass, before the bells peter out one by one in the same order as they began. What this tonal analysis seems to be telling us is that, as a result of the queen’s death, time has stopped working with its normal God-appointed regularity – that with her demise the natural world is out of kilter.

  The overall criticism, direct or indirect, that we find in Scheibe and Mattheson, while confined by their conceptual limitations, provides us with a benchmark with which to measure the degree of incomprehension people may have brought to Bach’s music: how could he persist so obstinately in ignoring their efforts to rationalise and catalogue appropriate and agreeable styles of composition? We can only imagine how dull Scheibe’s own ‘correct’ response to setting this text to music would have been.p The truth is that stylistic impropriety was a badge of Bach’s approach to invention in a culture that was not equipped to deal with its originality. As Birnbaum said of Scheibe, he ‘attempted to make Bach’s works repulsive to delicate ears’.17 The imaginative richness of Bach’s music – one of the qualities we now admire and savour perhaps as a result of what we have learnt from later composition – clashed noisily with the cultural values of his day and undermined widely accepted ideas of decorum.

  From Bach’s perspective, what made matters worse as regards the criticism of Mattheson and Scheibe was that both were mediocre composers. Mattheson, after showing early promise (see this page and footnote), soon drifted away from composition towards theoretical writing. Though some of it is astute and helps to fill gaps in our knowledge of how composers operated at the time, it turned Mattheson into a windbag of stupefying pomposity and self-importance. Scheibe, on the other hand, comes over as an embittered husk of a man consumed by envy, given to satirising and bad-mouthing his colleagues in code. Not even his co-critic Mattheson escaped his disdain, despite advocating a similarly ‘scientific’ approach to music. Scheibe was only too eager to retract his criticisms the moment any of his chosen targets showed the smallest interest in performing his own music.18 This all came about after accidentally losing an eye while working alongside his father, a Leipzig organ-builder. Having trained as a musician and failing to land any of the posts of organist for which he had applied (including one in Freiberg in 1731 and for which Bach had recommended him),19 he decided to become a music critic as well as a composer. In 1737 he published an article, pillorying Bach’s music for being ‘bombastic’ and ‘confused’ and referring to him pejoratively as a Musikant (Musikus would have been the correct term – the very one he used in the title of the fortnightly journal he founded, Critischer Musikus).

  As one of nine of his chosen victims, Bach was an easy target from the moment he became the only one to react publicly to Scheibe’s stinging criticism. But, instead of responding in person, Bach chose a professor of rhetoric, Magister Johann Abraham Birnbaum, to act as his counsel. This enraged Scheibe, who returned to redouble the attack, accusing Bach of ‘not taking an especial interest in the sciences actually needed by a learned composer … [namely in] the rules of rhetoric and poetics’.20 He mocked Bach for ‘never having taken the time to learn how to write an extensive letter.’ Actually, he had a point; for, in channelling so much energy into the formulation of organised sounds, Bach was prone to forgetting the simpler forms of written communication.q Social awkwardness and fear of intellectual engagement other than by means of music were a constant throughout his life.

  Bach did of course eventually put pen to paper in the rather awkward and prickly memorandum known to scholars as the ‘Entwurff’ (‘Brief but Highly Necessary Draft of a Well-Appointed Church Music’), which he submitted to the city council in August 1730.21 (See overleaf.) In it he pinpointed the main differences between himself and his contemporaries when he alluded to ‘the present musical taste’. By that he may have meant the galant style with which he probably had little sympathy but was perfectly capable of emulating since, according to Lorenz Mizler, another who wrote in his defence, he knew ‘perfectly how to suit himself to his listeners’ and ‘in accordance with the latest taste’.22 Bach was merely flattering the councillors’ sense of themselves as cultural connoisseurs equipped to assess how during the past dozen or so years ‘the taste has changed astonishingly’. In the same breath he referred to the shortcomings of the musical resources he was expected to draw on for services held in the four main city churches, the inadequacies in the council’s current provision of funds and personnel, and his minimum requirements when it came to musicians able to ‘master the new kinds of music, and thus be in a position to do justice to the composer and his work’. At this point he is clearly referring to himself: since his music is ‘far more intricate’ and more challenging to performers than any other, he needed well-paid specialists of the kind he had been used to in Cöthen or, as he tells the council, the virtuosi employed by the Elector himself: ‘One need only go to Dresden,’ he tells the council, ‘to see how the musicians there are paid by His Royal Majesty. It cannot fail, since the musicians are relieved of all concern for their living, free from chagrin and obliged each to master but a single instrument.’ (This sounds like a prototype of the modern orchestra, and, given that this pointed to the breakdown of the very versatility and transferability that was part of Bach’s success, it is rather ironic.) Bach’s pitch is none too subtle: restore the fees (beneficia) that a Most Noble and Most Wise Council used to pay his chorus musicus and he will instantly ‘bring the music into a better state’. They didn’t and he couldn’t. In fact he never received an acknowledgement, let alone a reasoned reply, to this poignant but blunt manifesto that has since given rise to so much misreading and controversy.

  Behind these remarks directed towards improving the pay and conditions (and therefore the quality) of his performing apparatus in Leipzig, we can sense the weight Bach attached to the act of performance itself – executio. The close scrutiny we give to the written notation of his works may distract us from a key component in his creativity: the way performance fed into the very act of composition. Take for example his three sonatas and three partitas for solo violin (BWV 1001–6) or the cello suites (BWV 1007–12). The deliberately restrictive medium teems with interpretative matter implied by, but not containable within, the notation. Their skeletal nature means that the music is festooned with little time-bombs of harmonic potential that tease the listener to speculate on how they might turn out – what chords are really implied, in other words. In order to grasp and ‘realise’ Bach’s harmonic movement, both player and listener are drawn in and required to complete the creative act. Nineteenth-century composers, beginning with Mendelssohn, and with Busoni the most conspicuous, took the bait and sought to capture this in their transcriptions – which simply underscores how unusual and original Bach’s chord progressions really are. Something similar happens when we look at Bernini’s life-sized marble statue of David in the Villa Borghese in Rome. Unlike Michelangelo’s classically poised hero, Bernini’s David looks as if has been sculpted in t
he heat of battle. Like an Olympic discus-thrower, he is coiled up, face contorted, muscles straining, about to release his slingshot at his unseen adversary any moment now. As unsuspecting viewers, walking round the sculpture and observing David’s twisting torso, we find ourselves drawn into the dramatic action. By occupying the space where we expect Goliath to be, and sensing the split second when David will release his slingshot, we become implicated in the action and present in the theatre of war; and in this way it is our imaginative response that completes the creative act of viewing the sculpture. In both cases – Bach’s and Bernini’s – the listener/viewer has to ‘work’ to constitute the finished article – something relatively new in the age of the Baroque, and not equivalent to mere ‘decoding’.r

  The first page of Bach’s ‘Entwurff’ – his combative, painstaking and fiercely argued memorandum to the Leipzig Council (1730). (illustration credit 41)

  Turning to his larger choral works involving several performers, including himself in a dual capacity, one gets the sensation that Bach as composer was constantly in dialogue with Bach the performer, and that performance actively influenced the creative process. Not everyone agrees. Some of the most painstaking modern scholars, equipped with the modernist methodological tools of analysis and textual criticism, shy away from anything connected to performance – though one would hope that they share with music-lovers and performing musicians an underlying conviction in the profound aesthetic experience and worth of the music as it is revealed through performance. Nevertheless, they tend to regard the act of performance as an optional extra – uncontrollable and variable, therefore misleading and potentially damaging to the intrinsic perfection of a composition as preserved in print or in one of Bach’s fair copies.s Bach was of course considered supreme as a performer in his lifetime and was celebrated far more as a keyboard virtuoso and for his improvisations than for his compositions, few of which were published or known outside a restricted geographical area; traces of their origins as improvisations are clearly apparent in the earliest of his keyboard fantasias and toccatas. The act of (re-)performance can help to take us back to an original that existed only in his head. As John Butt expresses it, performance can be seen ‘as much a part of the past, as of the future, of a newly finished piece’.23 The unusual amount of detailed figuration Bach includes in his scores relates to his practical experience as a performer, encapsulating in the most remarkable way the different strategies he used to improvise, elaborate and improve on a straightforward initial idea. It would be foolish to ignore the signs of creative synergy in the case of anyone so closely involved in the performance of his own music. We enrich our understanding of Bach’s music each time we come across traces of his own interpretation within its complex notation. There is also the bonus of his graceful and expressive orthography, which reveals the way he experienced his music and expected it to unfold – the shapes and gestures suggestive of his phrasing and motion. (See Plate 23.) It is hardly surprising that performers nowadays often play from facsimiles of his autographs in preference to the static and regularised visual image of the printed score.